Tuesday, 1 May 2018

Kharis Templeman, of the Stanford Taiwan Democracy & Security Project, has been pointing out some interesting developments in recent years in Taiwanese attitude surveys. The most striking of these can be seen in the below graph:

Any follower of Taiwanese affairs will be familiar with the decline of the Chinese-only identity in Taiwan since the democratic era began. Whilst possibly it was a minority position even long before this survey began, it fell rapidly during the first decade of Taiwanese democracy until it became the position of only a few percent of the population. At the same time both an exclusively Taiwanese and a mixed Taiwanese and Chinese identity began to be steadily adopted in Taiwan. Until recently the receive wisdom amongst at least part of the expat comentariat was that this mixed position was just a way-station on the road to becoming exclusively Taiwanese, and this found proof in the declining number of people identifying as mixed. However, as the graph shows, this trend has partially reversed over the last four years. What could explain this?

One guess is that increased exposure to mainlanders in Taiwan following the influx of tourists has changed some minds there. My own personal feeling was that, culturally speaking if perhaps not politically speaking, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese were only as different as (depending on how you want to look at it) English and Scottish people, or the people of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, and that increased exposure might highlight these similarities. Whether there is any truth to this is impossible to say without more data.

What there is data to show is that, as Templeman points out, concurrent with the above-described trend, pro-independence sentiment has fallen back a bit, and that pro-pan-green support has also seen a bit of a dip, with both these trends becoming apparent after the DPP's electoral win in 2016. I suppose it is inevitable that the hopes of DPP supporters during the Ma Yingjiu years might take a bit of a knock once the reality of an actual DPP government came about, but I am slightly doubtful that this could be the cause of a change in something so fundamental as how people see their own national identity. There may also be a growing realisation that few of the problems that face Taiwan are actually solved by Taiwanese independence or the development of an exclusively Taiwanese identity.